xhxhxhx:

twentygototen:

afaik the reason all cars look like tanks with tiny little gunslit windows is because rollover protection standards, and the reason all cars now have the same chinless, formless front ends is pedestrian safety. 

I can’t say I care enough about either of those things enough to believe it’s worth it, were those really things that killed tons of people or were they just next up on the list of regulations the government saddled automakers with now that much of the big-time safety issues have been eliminated?

I know this isn’t an argument that I can win–it’s not bad that cars are safer–and I’m not gonna take a “human life is worthless I want cool cars” angle here…I just wish shit were different. 

This reminds me of a passage from Michael Trebilcock’sreview of Jerry Mashaw and David Harfst’s The Struggle for Auto Safety (Harvard University Press, 1990), “Requiem for Regulators: The Passing of a Counter-Culture?”:

According to Mashaw and Harfst, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act was an historical anomaly: 

It subjected an unwilling industrial giant to regulation that its putative beneficiaries had not requested in order to address a social problem that had grown progressively less serious under nearly sixty years of uncontroversial state management [fatality rates per miles driven had dropped dramatically over this period]. And yet passage of the act commanded a political consensus of rare proportions, at least in peacetime. It was adopted by a vote of 371 to 0 in the House and 76 to 0 in the Senate. If the act was a political oddity, it was nonetheless an oddity whose time had come.

The authors explain the oddity in the following passage:

The emergence of the Safety Act of 1966 was almost comically over-determined. The recipe for the legislation read: take a persistent social evil; confront it with new technological and institutional solutions, painstakingly developed by creative scientists and reformist lawyers over several decades; place problem and solution in the heady atmosphere of an activist polity, apparently determined to rid the country (if not the world) of virtually all ignorance, vice, poverty, and danger through the application of national political power; add the drama of corporate villainy and heroic individual commitment [the Ralph Nader-General Motors affair]; wrap in the rhetoric of both scientific rationality and justice; stir by political competition and by skillful use of the media; and presto! This is the essence of the revolution of 1966.’

Pursuant to its statutory mandate, [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] in its early days contented itself with adopting design standards that were already widely prevalent in the industry. Beginning in 1968, however, the agency began to embark on what it conceived to be its primary mission: the promulgation of rules designed to realize the promise of passivity.

Prominent among these proposed rules was Standard 208. That rule initially simply required the installation of lap and shoulder belts but by way of an amendment in 1969, proposed moving to a passive-restraint technology. While it principally contemplated air-bags, Standard 208 also reflects a more general shift from design standards to performance standards. The rule envisaged setting standards that permitted an anthropomorphic dummy in frontal barrier crashes at 30 m.p.h. to survive, with car manufacturers being left with the burden of developing appropriate protective technology. This approach to auto safety rule-making was generalized in the so-called October Plan of 1971, in which NHTSA viewed Standard 208 as but a first step in the process of folding virtually all existing rules into a super-rule embodying an integrated set of performance-based standards. Contemplated in the October Plan was a brave new world of air-bags, automatic radar breaks, speed governors, peri- scopes, and alcohol interlocks.

However, the vision was short-lived. In 1972, the 6th Circuit upheld an injunction against Standard 208’s implementation in Chrysler Corp. v. Department of Transportation. That decision required tests for compliance with performance standards to be capable of identical results when test conditions were duplicated. The dummy specifications proposed in the standard were incapable of meeting this requirement. Subsequent decisions enjoined the implementation of other standards, such as air-brakes for trucks, buses and other heavy vehicles, on the grounds that NHTSA had not adduced sufficient evidence of the safety gains likely to be realized from the technology-forcing standards. The courts, of course, failed to realize that safety gains from such standards do not lend themselves to precise prediction. Other decisions invalidated rules on procedural grounds where NHSTA had modified proposed standards in response to previous comments and petitions without initiating further rounds of notice and comment. The cumulative effect of the decisions, according to the authors, made NHTSA largely helpless in the face of the full court press that an emboldened automobile industry subsequently mounted against most of the agency’s proposed rules.

The agency’s problems on the political front were even greater. Largely as a result of oversight hearings in 1974, Congress enacted amendments to the Act, which, according to the authors, subverted the original scientific rationale of the statute in several ways. Congress, by an overwhelming majority, first repealed an ignition interlock standard which prevented an automobile from being started unless seatbelts were attached, despite highly favorable cost- benefit ratios associated with that standard. Relatedly, Congress also gave itself the power to veto all future passive restraint measures that NHTSA might propose. In the wake of several widely publicized school bus accidents, Congress, in addition, mandated school bus safety standards despite uncontroverted evidence as to their lack of cost-effectiveness. Finally, Congress substantially extended the agency’s powers with respect to mandatory recalls of defective vehicles by requiring manufacturers to remedy safety defects at no cost to the owners.

In the legislative debate over the ignition interlock, anecdotal arguments overwhelmed scientific rigor. As the authors write:

Malfunction horror stories became the order of the day. Ignition interlocks had stranded (or could strand) a motorist in the path of an oncoming train. Women were unable to flee rapists. Parking attendants, who had to buckle-up no matter how short the trip, were going nuts. Housewives were buckling in their groceries. Hertz could not obtain sufficient towing services to retrieve malfunctioning vehicles. And in account after account, the family pet, usually a dog, set lights blinking, buzzers buzzing, and interlocks locking.

In the Senate floor debate, Senator Eagleton related a story from a constituent who had put a turkey in a seat belt on the drive home from the supermarket, and also reported that Senator Tower had to buckle in his dachshund in order to start his car. The combination of merriment, ridicule, and outrage was more than the epidemiological theory of accidents could withstand.

In the wake of the judicial and legislative assault on its original statutory mandate, NHTSA shifted its focus from regulation by rule-making to regulation by recall, a shift that continues to the present date. Since the early 1970’s, NHTSA has adopted few if any new safety standards. The number of mandatory recalls, however, has escalated dramatically, with recalls in several years exceeding new car sales. Despite the level of recalls, the authors claim that the empirical evidence shows that the impact of recalls on safety is trivial, perhaps amounting to a reduction of deaths and injuries of less than 1.5 percent. This contention contrasts with the Brookings Institution’s comprehensive empirical evaluation of the safety gains from NHTSA motor vehicle standards. The latter study finds that the standards may have reduced fatalities by as much as 40 percent since the inception of the legislation, and may result in an annual reduction of 23,000 fatalities. Despite the Brookings Institution’s equally positive assessments of the costs and benefits of air-bags and other passive restraint systems, NHTSA is now committed to abandoning any passive restraint standard if states accounting for two-thirds of the population adopt mandatory seat-belt use laws that satisfy certain conditions. As the authors suggest, this reflects a reorientation of auto safety regulation from science and planning to the old and, scientifically speaking, discredited approach to traffic safety of crime and punishment.

In the end, the public defeated the regulators.

Yeah, the only thing that guarantees the necrophiles (or anyone) will win is if people get the sense that it’s inevitable.

Consider also Wisconsin, which under influence of the Wisconsin Tavern League has been able to effectively blunt national pushes against underage drinking and drunk driving